Can We Trust Vladimir Putin?

Back in 2002, in the dark ages before Breitbart News Network, the great conservative commentator Ben Shapiro warned that the United States must “Keep an eye on Russia,” because “Russia is renewing her relations with America’s enemies.” Shapiro reiterated his message in 2007, warning America that “Russia isn’t to be trusted.”

Last month, Breitbart National Security reporter Jordan Schachtel warned about the deceitful “charm” of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin—a staple of Soviet disinformation (like the stories about “Uncle Joe” Stalin). The two administrations (skipping Clinton, as that was only a year) which have dealt with Putin so far—George “I looked the man in the eye, got a sense of his soul” Bush and Barack “Flexibility” Obama—have been ensnared by Putin’s charm into thinking they could be partners, only to be stabbed in the back.

It is time to update Ben Shapiro’s warning and prove his prophetic thesis correct.

Middle East:

In his address to a joint meeting of Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned:

Don’t be fooled. The battle between Iran and ISIS doesn’t turn Iran into a friend of America.

Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic. The other calls itself the Islamic State. Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.

As a man closer to the action than anyone of either party—Republican or Democrat—Netanyahu put the issue in stark perspective:

So when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

The difference is that ISIS is armed with butcher knives, captured weapons and YouTube, whereas Iran could soon be armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs. We must always remember—I’ll say it one more time—the greatest dangers facing our world is the marriage of militant Islam with nuclear weapons. To defeat ISIS and let Iran get nuclear weapons would be to win the battle, but lose the war. We can’t let that happen.

So why does Putin support Iran?

Why did the Russian dictator block every attempt by the Bush administration to stop Iran’s nuclear program? Why did they build a nuclear reactor for the Iranians at Bushehr—which Putin privately admitted to President Bush that he knows the Iranians do not need and that is capable of reprocessing enough plutonium for at least 60 nuclear weapons? Why did the Russians just agree to sell Iran sophisticated air defense missiles they would use to protect Iran’s nuclear facilities from America and Israel? Why would anyone build these things for a regime that endlessly declares their intention to destroy America and kill Jews?

Anyone who tries to enforce any of the provisions in the Obama-Iran deal (as opposed to Ted Cruz’s pledge to rip it up) is going to have a showdown with the Russians—who are strong supporters of the deal and stand to gain millions from weapons deals once the arms sanctions on Iran expire in five years (which is part of the deal).

Speaking of Russian weapons, when Israel was fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, the Israelis found that Hezbollah’s weapons were labeled “Customer: Ministry of Defence of Syria. Supplier: KBP, Tula, Russia.” Last year, it was reported that “Israel has carried out several airstrikes inside Syria to halt suspected shipments of advanced missiles, including Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles and guided missiles from Iran, from reaching Hezbollah.”

Additionally, “In 2006, Jane’s defence journal reported that Hezbollah was receiving intelligence from two Russian-Syrian intelligence posts during its war with Israel, one of which was identified as being located on the Golan Heights.” One of these stations, a Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) signals intelligence station, was recently captured by the Free Syrian Army. They discovered wall maps showing northern Israel “with pinpointed Israeli military units and signal stations.”

Just a reminder of who exactly Russia is giving all these weapons and intelligence to, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah famously declared in a speech to his Islamic terrorist army:

The Jews will gather from all parts of the world into occupied Palestine, not in order to bring about the anti-Christ and the end of the world, but rather that Allah the Glorified and Most High wants to save you from having to go to the ends of the world, for they have gathered in one place—they have gathered in one place—and there the final and decisive battle will take place.”

Let the entire world hear me. Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute…

I conclude my speech with the slogan that will continue to reverberate on all occasions so that nobody will think that we have weakened. Regardless of how the world has changed after 11 September, Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America.

Hezbollah’s most infamous member was Imad Mughniyeh, who orchestrated the murder of 241 American Marines on a peacekeeping mission in Beirut, and who worked with Putin’s friend Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani to kill many more Americans in Iraq. As Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “Imad Mughniyeh is the terrorist mastermind who spilled more American blood than any other terrorist besides Osama bin Laden.”

Putin, however, considers Hezbollah as well as Hamas not to be terrorist organizations, but democratic parts of society. We know this because his Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said so:

“We maintain contacts and relations with [Hezbollah] because we do not consider them a terrorist organization. They have never committed any terrorist attacks on Russian territory,” Bogdanov was cited as saying.

Bogdanov said Hezbollah and Hamas — the main Palestinian armed resistance group — had both been democratically elected and were “legitimate societal-political forces.”

However, both groups have been blacklisted by the United States as terrorist organizations.

“The Americans consider Hamas a terrorist organization. But we don’t agree, because they [represent] an integral part of Palestinian society,” Bogdanov was cited as saying in the report.

Want more direct proof that Vladimir Putin wanted to help our enemy to kill and maim as many young Americans as possible?

Right before the Iraq war, the Russians learned from “sources at U.S. Central Command in Doha, Qatar”—or to put it more bluntly, from Russian agents who were spying on our military commanders and stealing our secrets—of the exact composition and strategy of U.S. military forces preparing to enter Iraq. The Russian ambassador to Iraq, Vladimir Teterenko, took that information and gave it to Saddam’s regime.

The reason this is public knowledge that is because Saddam’s men wrote it all down, and Americans found those reports after removing Saddam from power and capturing the regime’s archives. There are also photos from Russian media of Russian generals meeting with their Iraqi counterparts in the days before the war, who told the media that they “didn’t fly to Baghdad to drink coffee.” With this intelligence in hand, Saddam was able to prepare an insurgency to kill Americans and drag on for years doing so.

Even after Saddam was gone, Putin continued to help kill our men and women in uniform. In August of 2007, Sen. Joe Lieberman wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. military estimates that between 80% and 90% of suicide attacks in Iraq are perpetrated by foreign fighters, making them the deadliest weapon in al Qaeda’s war arsenal…

That is why we now must focus on disrupting this flow of suicide bombers — and that means focusing on Syria, through which up to 80% of the Iraq-bound extremists transit…

Before al Qaeda’s foreign fighters can make their way across the Syrian border into Iraq, however, they must first reach Syria — and the overwhelming majority does so, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, by flying into Damascus International Airport, making the airport the central hub of al Qaeda travel in the Middle East, and the most vulnerable chokepoint in al Qaeda’s war against Iraq and the U.S. in Iraq.

Putin could have forced his puppet Bashar al-Assad to stop this at any time and saved thousands of American lives. But he did not. He was too busy selling Assad weapons and protecting him at the UN and elsewhere.

East Asia:

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin decided to let Stalinist North Korea fall into the ash heap of history, where it belongs. He even admitted that it was Stalin and his puppet Kim Il Sung that started the Korean War, something that Russia had denied for 40 years. Yeltsin promised South Korea that the 1961 military treaty between the Soviet Union and North Korea was now meaningless, existing “in name only.” Isolated and bankrupt, North Korea was well on its way to collapse.

Then came Vladimir Putin, who fished the Kims out of the ash heap. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il said:

Today everybody is using diplomatic terms, like ‘partnership’ and ‘strategic partnership.’ I told President Putin that we do not need to look for such a term to apply to our relationship. Putin agreed. It’s all diplomacy, and what we need is sincerity. I don’t want to be a ‘partner.’ You don’t say ‘partner’ with friends.

In July of 2000—in his very first year in office—Putin made it a point to become the first Russian head-of-state to ever visit North Korea since the Communist state was founded in 1948. It was also the first Asian capital visited by Putin as leader. From that day forward, Putin has been as much an obstacle towards action on North Korea as he is with Iran. He is the Kims’ protector, as much as he is Khamenei’s.

Putin has stepped up to the plate for the Kims in the international arena. In 2010, North Korea launched an unprovoked attack on a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors. Russia decided to help North Korea perpetuate a laughable cover-up. Additionally, as noted by former top House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer Dennis P. Halpin in March, Putin is being quite generous with the Kims.

NK News reports a steady flow of crude oil from the Russian Far East into North Korea during the new year. Reuters reported on January 28 that “Russia has pushed ahead with plans for natural gas and transport projects with the North in the hope of boosting gas exports to Asia and exporting coal to South Korea through an experimental consortium based in the North.” NK News on February 12 cited Vitali Survillo, chairman of the new Russian-North Korean bilateral business council, on Russia’s interest in developing North Korea’s roads, water, and electric infrastructure over the next 20 years in exchange for natural resources.

In the area of weapons procurement and advancement, Putin has been North Korea’s enabler by proxy. The clearest example is the North Korean nuclear facility blown up by an Israeli airstrike in 2007. Why did Israel destroy a North Korean nuclear facility? Because it was in Syria. As was reported at the time, “Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month… They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean.”

The Kim regime was then in talks to break out of its isolation and was thus under heavy scrutiny. Nobody was paying attention to Syria back then (or so it seemed), so the site offered North Korea the ability to harvest plutonium from spent fuel rods without attracting unwanted attention.

As stated before—Syria is a Russian satellite state. There is no way they did not know about this—keep in mind the aforementioned Russian intelligence facility that was spying on Israel was not far from there. Why did they not do anything about this? In fact, as a member of the “6-party talks” negotiating with North Korea at the time, why didn’t the Russians at least say something about it to us? The inescapable conclusion is that Putin was a supporter of this scheme. The site of the reactor, which was near the border with Iraq, is now under the control of ISIS—meaning that if Israel had not taken action, ISIS may have had a North Korean nuke today, thanks to Putin.

In fact, the scheme may have been restarted in the city of Qusayr back in 2009—around the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was referring to Assad as a “reformer” and having a “reset” with the Russians. According to a Der Spiegel report from earlier this year:

The clearest proof that it is a nuclear facility comes from radio traffic recently intercepted by a network of spies. A voice identified as belonging to a high-ranking Hezbollah functionary can be heard referring to the “atomic factory” and mentions Qusayr. The Hezbollah man is clearly familiar with the site. And he frequently provides telephone updates to a particularly important man: Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission.

The Hezbollah functionary mostly uses a codename for the facility: “Zamzam”…

Experts are also convinced that North Korea is involved in Zamzam as well. Already during the construction of the Kibar facility, Ibrahim Othman worked closely together with Chou Ji Bu, an engineer who built the nuclear reactor Yongbyon in North Korea.

Chou was long thought to have disappeared. Some thought that he had fallen victim to a purge back home. Now, though, Western intelligence experts believe that he went underground in Damascus. According to the theory, Othman never lost contact with his shady acquaintance. And experts believe that the new nuclear facility could never have been built without North Korean know-how. The workmanship exhibited by the fuel rods likewise hints at North Korean involvement.

If Putin is willing to abet North Korean agression, weapons development, and even WMD proliferation, the conclusion that Russia is a bad actor in the Far East should not be too controversial.

Latin America:

It is not very well known, but Putin allegedly started his post-Soviet political career with the help of Colombian Cocaine Cartel money—which was laundered through a German Real Estate company. In his choice of client states, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

“Chavez was a brave and very thorough man who was able to showcase strong character to go through with his plans. He genuinely wanted to rid the country’s poor citizens of their plight and improve their lives. Chavez became the symbol of independence throughout Latin America while he was still alive. He’s joined the legendary ranks of Simon Bolivar, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara,” said Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Putin is speaking of Hugo Chavez, the man who destroyed democracy in Venezuela. Aside from the comparisons to communist mass murderers Fidel and Che (Simón Bolivar, on the other hand, loved and admired America), nothing of what Putin said of the late Venezuelan dictator is true. Not only is that well-documented, but Breitbart News has an eyewitness to Chavez’s crimes—the former radical turned anti-terrorist hero Brandon Darby, who once found himself trapped in Venezuela for a number of months in 2006.

“I began to realize that there were indeed many poor barrios receiving help and aid from the nationalized oil company,” wrote Darby. “But I also began to realize that many of Venezuela’s poor were not getting help at all. The help was primarily focused on the barrios that were part of the Global Exchange tours, but other barrios received little to nothing. I learned of indigenous people is Venezuela’s oil-rich Zulia province who were being forcibly removed from ancestral lands for the oil.”

“I began to look at Chávez with great skepticism,” Darby continued:

I didn’t share my concerns with my newfound friends from PDVSA [the nationalized oil company of Venezuela, CITCO’s parent company], but I did start traveling to various barrios to meet with those who had criticisms of the way the Bolivarian revolution was playing out…

I began to feel less than comfortable accepting money from a nation where I saw poverty like none I had ever seen in the United States—even in the aftermath of Katrina. I began to see that Chávez’s “care” for the poor in the US and his Kennedy Foundation-supported heating oil programs for the poor in the United States was carried out at the expense of those suffering from even greater poverty in his own nation.

So what? Well—with Cuba, Iran, and Russia as its prime international supporters—the Venezuelan government is corrupting elections all over Latin America and putting communist, drug trafficking, anti-American regimes in power. Worse, it supports terrorism (especially narcoterrorism)—and has even tried to export terrorism to the United States.

“I learned that Hamas had a presence and relationships in the former guerrilla-laden barrios,” wrote Darby, “and the Basque ETA had a strong presence as well.” Darby continued:

Meanwhile, my meetings with the PDVSA executives began to take a strange turn. The discussions started veering off of potential funding opportunities for New Orleans relief efforts. [PDVSA executive Fidel Cedeño] and his cohort began educating me about the US military and informing me that even the US’s fancy equipment couldn’t find guerrillas in the swamps due to heat and swamp gases. They felt that a guerrilla movement could exist there.

They began asking me about the black population and if they were turning on the US government enough yet that a guerrilla movement could be sustained.

They began asking me to travel with them to northwestern Colombia to meet with a guerrilla group aligned with the FARC. I refused. They began pressuring me to at least travel with them to Maracaibo, which was close to Colombia. I refused.

The one country that has been consistently willing and able to stand up to Chavez, and his hand-picked successor Nicolas Maduro, is Colombia. Putin had secretly pledged to lend its weaponry and intelligence support to Venezuela in the event that the one-sided terrorist war Venezuela has waged against Colombia should turn into a full-blown war.

Thanks to a successful Colombian military operation, we now have a mass of FARC documents that prove Venezuela’s sponsorship of FARC terrorism—which makes Venezuela-FARC the Iran-Hezbollah of the Western Hemisphere. And that comparison is complete with Russian weapons being given to the terrorists and the sale of anti-aircraft missiles to the terror-sponsors.

The comparison is also complete when it comes to persecution of Jews—many of whom have had to flee Venezuela due to the increasing presence of Hamas and Hezbollah. Not to mention official anti-semitism, as Hugo Chavez stated on December 24, 2005:

The world is for all of us, then, but it so happens that a minority, the descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ, the descendants of the same ones that kicked Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way over there in Santa Marta, in Colombia. A minority has taken possession of all the wealth in the world.

And this is all going on, as they used to say in Reagan’s day, right in our backyard. And like Reagan’s day, Russia is supporting it. And it is inching closer and closer to our border.

Europe:

“The United States cannot remain an open, democratic society if we are left alone – a garrison state in a hostile world. We need independent nations with whom to trade, to consult and cooperate. We need friends and allies with whom to share the pleasures and the protection of our civilization. We cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the subversion of others’ independence or to the development of new weapons by our adversaries or of new vulnerabilities by our friends.”

Those are the words of Ronald Reagan’s United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, in a too often overlooked part of her famous speech to the 1984 Republican National Convention. With those words, she definitively explains why the fate of the free world matters to America. From this, it is easy to determine that the fate of democracy in Europe matters to all who care about freedom and the survival of the West.

The Reagan administration clearly understood this, and deployed missiles to Western Europe to counter the Soviet missiles aimed at West European cities.

The Soviets also understood this, which is why longtime KGB head and short-time Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov orchestrated the Nuclear “Freeze” movement – backed up by Moscow-financed (“Moscow Gold”) political figures and fabricated “science” about a “Nuclear Winter” – to disarm the West. The key to this strategy was the Left’s endless capacity to, in Ambassador Kirkpatrick’s words, “Blame America First.”

The reason for this trip down memory lane is the fact that lessons were learned on how to effectively manipulate European politics. And a man who learned these lessons well was a then second rate KGB officer in East Germany named Vladimir Putin – a man who idolizes Yuri Andropov.

Russian money (“Moscow Gold”) has been flowing into fringe populist parties of the Left and Right – Marxist and Fascist. Contacts have also been established between European politicians and Putin’s neo-fascist advisor Alexander Dugin. France’s National Front party, Greece’s Syriza party, Hungary’s Jobbik party, and more, are under Russian influence. These figures have been able to ride the wave of discontent over the EU’s disfunction (“Blame America/Europe First”), and have forced their way into political relevancy.

Additionally, there is another reason for large-scale European submission to Russian interests. In 2014, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then the secretary-general of NATO, said: “I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas.” That’s why Europe won’t frack – they are swamped by disinformation about environmental catastrophe. (Kind of like “Nuclear Winter”)

What happens when Moscow’s puppets become dominant? Ask the Ukrainians. At the height of the Revolution against the Kremlin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych, Senator Ted Cruz told the Heritage Foundation:

President Yanukovych has taken more from Putin than money, he has taken the direct strategy and approach of moving to suppress the Ukrainian people’s rights, brutally, with a jack boot and a rifle. His political opponents are languishing in prison, and yet the people of Ukraine are crying out to be free. You cannot help but watch the scenes of hundreds of thousands of people braving bitter cold – all of us bundled up in our jackets because it’s a little bit nippy in Washington – go to the streets of Kiev, with the brutal winter barreling down. Yet, you see the proud Ukrainian people standing up to be free, they don’t want to be dominated by Putin’s Russia, they want to stand free and they want to stand with the West.

When the Ukrainian people regained their freedom, Putin attacked – and his paid stooges all over Europe came to his side. But the brave Ukrainian people are fighting back, and have made significant gains against the KGB and Russian-backed terrorists trying to destroy their renewed democracy.

Senator Cruz says that “It is not complicated what Putin seeks to do. Putin is working to systematically reassemble the old Soviet Union.”

The choice in Europe is as clear today as it was 30 years ago – do we side with democracy, or do we side with the Evil Empire?

Poisoning the Well:

“I think the whole world is realizing what will be with Ukraine, and only U.S. keep on fuck around because of their great plans are doomed to failure.”

Those are the comments one comes to expect whenever one writes something about Putin. These comments are supposed to be written by ordinary people, but are obviously not. They are written by a paid Kremlin army of trolls tasked with promoting Moscow’s line on comments sections, Facebook, Twitter – anywhere they can.

As one observer put it: “If it looks like Kremlin shit, smells like Kremlin shit, and tastes like Kremlin shit too — then it’s Kremlin shit.”

Personally, I hope these people are who they appear to be – inmates at the psych ward of some prison for Russian Neo-Nazis. Because I would hate to think that normal people have to spend all day in the darkness of vile invective and often anti-semitic conspiracy theories in the service of an oppressive dictator.

Breitbart’s National Security editor Sebastian Gorka, who’s family escaped from Soviet tyranny in Hungary after the 1956 Revolution was crushed (by Yuri Andropov, by the way, who justified it with propaganda portraying the Hungarian freedom fighters as Nazis), was flooded by this crap when he wrote that America should stand with the Ukrainian people.

There is also the 24/7 English-language “Kremlin shit” TV station known as RT. Last year, another descendant of Hungarian freedom fighters quit on air after she couldn’t take it anymore.

“[A]s a reporter on this network I face many ethical and moral challenges especially me personally coming from a family whose grandparents came here as refugees during the Hungarian revolution, ironically to escape the Soviet forces. I have family on the opposite side, on my mother’s side that sees the daily grind of poverty and I’m very lucky to have grown up here in the United States. I’m the daughter of a veteran. My partner is a physician at a military base where he sees every day the first-hand accounts of the ultimate prices that people pay for this country. And that is why personally I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian Government that whitewashes the actions of Putin. I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth and that is why after this newscast I’m resigning.” – Liz Wahl, live on RT.

Wahl later elaborated on some of the weird stuff she was asked to do at the station, including wall-to-wall coverage of Occupy Wall Street. “Of course the coverage made the United States look terrible. Video of outraged protesters, heavy-handed police and tents pitched in parks portrayed America as a country in the midst of a popular uprising—it was the beginning of the inevitable decline of a capitalistic world power. Occupy was our lead story for weeks and then months, even as the number of protesters dwindled and tents cleared out. We sucked that story completely dry.”

There was also the Kremlin’s favorite 2012 candidate. “In RT’s eyes, only one candidate mattered: Ron Paul. I don’t remember Paul ever speaking to RT during campaign season, but that didn’t stop our obsessive coverage of the ‘rock star’ candidate. After a while the bosses’ fixation with him seemed bizarre. Why were they pushing non-stop coverage of this long shot?” The answer is pretty simple: because Ron Paul could always be relied on to say something stupid and anti-American. It was always “Blame America First” with RT and RP. And whenever you said anything about it or dared to support anyone else, you were flooded with barely coherent, hysterical, conspiracy laden messages. (Ever wonder why?)

Wahl also notes that “Another troubling thing about RT was its popularity among fringe extremists.” She sites the example of Abby Martin, a 9/11 truther and an advocate of an anti-Western ideology. “The Russian bosses love her lack of restraint in catering to a paranoid audience,” and “The more deranged the conspiracy theory, the more the Russian managers seemed to love it.” Wahl writes that Martin, who has gone on to accuse Wahl of being part of a neocon conspiracy to embarrass the station (and had a friend at Truthdig.com – a website started by 70s-era North Korea shill Robert Scheer – to do the same), was photographed at an RT holiday party “giving the middle finger to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” According to writer Steve Bloomfield, Martin has “spoken on air of the ‘many unanswered questions’ about 9/11 and how Israel uses ‘Hitler’s methods’ against the Palestinians.” She recently posted a photo of herself wearing a t-shirt saying “Fuck Chris Kyle.” Bloomfield notes that Martin’s views are not out of place at all at RT: “According, for example, to Rory Suchet, RT’s main news anchor, other news channels are controlled by ‘financiers’ and ‘corporations’. It is all, he told me, part of the ‘military-industrial complex’ and he mused how some people believe ‘there is too much Jewish money in America’. There is an argument, he suggested, that ‘Jewish money controls a huge amount of foreign policy in Washington’.”

It is not known how much of this nonsense Putin himself believes, but he is adamant about using all this to poison the well of public opinion.

Never “Ignore the Facts of History and the Aggressive Impulses of an Evil Empire”:

I think it would be a wonderful outcome if every Republican across the spectrum followed the model of Ronald Reagan and spoke with a clarion clarity for freedom and against oppression—spoke out against Russian aggression before they march into Ukraine, spoke out against Venezuelan aggression as Maduro murders protesters fighting for freedom, spoke out and called for the freedom of Leopoldo López, the opposition leader wrongfully imprisoned because Maduro is afraid of the desire for freedom of his citizens, and stood resolutely for vigorous sanctions against Iran, for using every tool necessary, including if necessary overwhelming military force, to prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons. That is a Reaganesque foreign policy, and nothing would make me happier than seeing every Republican… embrace that foreign policy.

Indeed, and to do so will require the courage to stand up to Putin and his cabal of anti-American dictator friends with confidence and conviction.

As Ben Shapiro, who is today Breitbart Editor-at-Large, warned nearly 10 years ago: “We cannot continue to ignore Russia’s rogue nationalism. There is a bear in the woods again.”